Robert Irwin

The work of artist Robert Irwin is essential; I find that the way he talks about his work is essential, too: a model of radical clarity. 

Arts and Crafts

I just read that Sam Maloof has died, at the age of 93.  A woodworker, Maloof famously refused to identify himsef as an artist and insisted that his rocking chairs were to be rocked and his cribs were for babies to sleep in, not just striking objects to look at but exquisite surfaces to touch and be put to use.  He was part of a Southern Californian crafts scene that, to my mind, included people like the ceramicist Paul Soldner (Soldner was a neighbor when I was a kid, with a stone house like ours in Russian Village on the Claremont/Montclair border; Maloof lived in Alta Loma, not so far away) as well as countless others working in niches between the ornamental and the practical that California seemed to have always attracted like a magnet.  

I don't think it's much of a stretch to also associate a number of west coast musicians with these craftsmen — Lou Harrison and Harry Partch and Erv Wilson, certainly, but also John Cage, for all of whom craftmanship (in notation or instrument building, for example) was important, as well as the inventive use of found materials, and were never narrowly constrained by the conventional and narrow definitions of their professional disciplines, but rather an attitude that any interesting line of work could be pursued, DIY.  Moreover these musicians seemlessly incorporated craft elements into their work in contrast to the way in which a Schoenberg kept his hobbies (designing playing cards or a cardboard violin) at home or Hindemith identified the craft of composition with a guild-like professional compentency.  

There is a well-known and rather formal art historical term, Arts and Crafts, that identifies a movement in architecture and the decorative arts that, with probable roots in the English movement of the same name, flowered in California and further up the west coast.  Facing the Pacific, Asian models were as important as those from Europe, and the European models as often as not were filtered through the Spanish and Mexican colonial/mission era.   I can remember, in the 60's, visiting the homes of various elderly relatives, all of which exhibited mixtures of architecture, furniture, decor, and objects which comfortably incorporated all of these influences.  My great grandmother's place in Paso Robles was a white-plastered, red tile-roofed adobe bungalow, where persian rugs inside looked up at wrought iron Mexican lamps, and dinner was served on real blue china from China, the model for her garden was, despite the hot climate, an English one with Japanese-inspired touches. The movement was never exclusive to professional artists.  That house and garden in Paso Robles was sketched on by the owner-builder on butcher paper and later on had hand-made lace, stained glass windows, and wallpapers to accompany the purchased items.  Russian Village was only one of several complexes in Southern California with houses made from rocks, salvaged slabs of flood-wrecked concrete pavement and any other bits of thrown-away but still usable material. (The famous Watts Towers are a close sculptural relation of these houses).   The movement reached outward and downward: a standard field of instruction in public schools was "arts and crafts" rather than the traditional fine arts trio of drawing, painting and sculpture. John Cage's mother, for a time, owed an Arts and Crafts store in LA, selling materials to home hobbyists; his engagement with graphic design and, later in life, with printmaking mixed the seriousness of someone who know the mainstream world of modern art well with the play of someone who was willing to try it himself.  I also think that there's an obvious straight line to be drawn from Cage's can-do music education experiments with his Aunt Pheobe and in WPA projects to his music for percussion and the prepared piano.   

Lou Harrison will always be a professional role model for me: if he needed a particular instrument, he had it built or built it himself.  (A friend once quipped that "with every step forward in technology, Lou was apt to take two steps backward".*) Two of Lou's own role models were William Morris and Arnold Dolmetsch, direct connections to that other Arts and Crafts movement.  His calligraphy was of a different aesthetic than Cage's, connected to older historical models (Morris especially) than Cage's more strictly modernist influences (i.e. Maholy-Nagy), but both had manuscript hands that were attractive, legible, and immediately identifiable as their own, impulses that go at some odds with the emphasis elsewhere on a more uniform professional copying style.    

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* That same friend predicted that Lou would soon be making his own paper, but Lou actually became a serious advocate of non-tree papers and it was Cage who would incorporate his own paper (with ingredients including kitchen scraps) in his visual art works.  Lou was also not-entirely-so-backward with regard to technology.  With Carter Scholz, he devised several sets of computer fonts based on his calligraphy, which are now available from Frog Peak Music.

Seeing, Hearing, Reading Writings

Why do I get so much more of a charge (that is, an impulse to make more music) these days from reading visual artists write about their work than musicians writing about music?  Duchamp, naturally, Robert Irwin, necessarily (the new edition of Weschler's amazing book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees), Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, with continued pleasure, Ad Reinhardt's Art as Art...  Although I see poorly and have no talents for producing objects which one might look at, these ideas shock and provoke my acoustical imagination.  They make me want to make noises both gentle and rough, to challenge the nature and limits of my hearing.  

Reading  Ad Reinhardt, for example, is not a matter of simple agreement but is just as often a matter of productive disagreement.   The consequent development of his work and ideas is a model, his ethical stance is admirable, and I agree with his insistance that artwork is not political (other than the fact of its existence in a polity which would rather not have it, or worse, ignore it) but that artists should be politically engaged simply because, as people living in societies, politics is a practical necessity in order to make lives better. But I disagree profoundly with Reinhardt's insistance on painting as THE Art as Art.  Music can do that just as well. Or rather, listening more critically to my most recent work, music should be able to do that just as well.   

George Brecht

Sad news comes: the artist George Brecht has died, at the age of 82, in Cologne.   His name is probably associated by most with that of the Fluxus scene*, and while his works, both objects and performances, are among the strongest of that association field,  they had their own distinct origins and took a path of admirably independent consequence.  There are two pieces of writing by Brecht that were valuable to me: his 1957 essay, Chance-Imagery, some parts of which are slightly off, but still... and the set of notebooks which begin with the most thorough documentation available of John Cage's course in experimental music at The New School in 1958. _____

*I've long had in mind writing something about Fluxus, but my impressions were fairly negative; under Maciunas's leadership it seemed too commercially-oriented and uncomfortably competitive with when not hostile to the work of others (Charlotte Moorman, for example).  Not to mention the whole Fluxus collectors' scene, an ugly affair, it seems.  Recently, however, a chance viewing of an episode of the current  television series Mad Men, set in a Madison Ave. advertising agency in the early 1960's, has been a trigger for some revision in my thinking about this, especially the character played by Robert Morse, a small role, but one that puts a twist onto an homage of his role in the 1960's musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In Mad Men, Morse is now the older boss (the Rudy Vallee role in How to Succeed...) instead of the ambitious youth in the mail room. In this episode, he is heard to recommend reading Ayn Rand to a young employee.  Here's the connection: Maciunas was a Randite objectivist and the Fluxus artist provided Maciunas with objects to sell. You read it here first.

De Maria

The point I'm making here is that the most beautiful thing is to experience a work of art over a period of time. — Walter De Maria

This1972 interview with sculptor De Maria — whose Lightning Field is perhaps the most impressive single work of art I know — is further evidence of the origins of the practices that came to be known as minimalism in the west coast radical arts scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. There are some unfortunate errors in the transcript (of names, especially: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Loren Rush), but it's nevertheless a valuable document.

WDM: But Lamont's (sic) static music and Whitman's touch, it was really fine. Lamont is only now coming out with records, only now coming out with the second record. Lamont has influenced Terry Riley who has made beautiful records. Terry Riley influenced Steve Reich who has made these records for Columbia and Phil Glass evidently discovered a similar type of music independently. So now they have what they call a Hynoptic School of music. Very static, long long tones without great variations from measure to measure, more like a solid state or a solid feeling. Rather than having great variations in pitch and variations of melody, you carry on solid . . . .

PC: Drone.

WDM: Yeah, almost like the drone is the basis of it. Lamont developed that and I played a certain part in it, making certain tapes like in '64, and Terry Riley developed it in his way using the tape delay, where you play a certain thing and then three seconds later it plays again and then it echoes again and the beautiful N C and Rainbow occurred on Columbia Records. I was very close to Terry and I nearly formed a band with Terry and John Cale. We were playing right in the other part of the studio, had all of the material set up. We were trying, but Terry had his idea, John Cale has his, I had mine. To make a band you have to work out your common feelings and ideas, and it's just too much.

Robert Irwin Plays the Game

"So if you start telling them what art is now, then all you've done is burden them with an old idea." Artist Robert Irwin lecturing, La Jolla, February 2008

Getting yourself into trouble

Sometimes you can learn more about composition from artists engaged in media other than music. Here's a great video interview with the painter Chuck Close, talking about when a work is finished, the advantages of working within constraints, the development of a personal style,

...painters would similarly try to get themselves into trouble. You'd push yourself into your own corner where nobody else's answers will fit and that's the key to finding yourself.

and much more.

WHY 17 PATTERNS?

"Renaissance choral music should sound like wallpaper." -- Richard K. Winslow

At first, I thought that Winslow's quip was all wrong, reducing gloriously detailed counterpoint to flat and monotonous wall hangings. But a bit of research into wallpaper patterns or groups quickly demonstrates that wallpaper is much more than Muzac for tired eyes.

There are 17 possible wallpaper groups, which are two dimensional repetitive patterns. Wallpaper groups are more complex than frieze groups (which repeat in only one dimension) and less complex than three-dimensional crystallographic or space groups. The groups are classified according to their symmetries, and once you understand the symmetries, even the most mathematically resistant can follow the proof that there can only be 17.

If I were a more social type, I'd rush out to invite 16 other composers to join me in composing a set of 17 pieces, each one based upon one of the 17 wallpaper patterns. The patterns can be usefully extended through the choice of colors, something which immediately suggests a variety of scoring patterns in a musical translation. I don't know if they'd be better served by a vocal ensemble or by Morton Feldman's ensemble of flute/percussion/piano (with doublings). In any case, the title would have to be Why 17 Patterns?

Composition Lessons with Paul Klee

One of the books on composition I turn to most often is Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook. Klee was also an accomplished musician, and his little Bauhaus plan for theoretical instruction is equally applicable to composition in music as well as the visual arts. His themes -- active, passive and medial lines, structure, dimension, scale, earth/water/air, and motion -- will be familiar to any musician.

Dripping with Authenticity

So someone turns up with a collection of drip paintings hidden away for years in a Long Island storage shed, and a claim is made that they are the work of Jackson Pollock. A study is done, turns out that some of the paints could not have existed when Pollock was working. Quite a bit of money and some careers are at stake one way or another, all based upon the question of whether Jackson Pollock was the painter.

Curiously absent from the whole discussion, at least as it has reached the press, is a voice willing to step up and say -- without regard to provenance -- whether the paintings are any good. Indeed, there is little information to be found about the paintings at all beyond the possible Pollock connection.

What would have happened if the whole story had been framed differently, as a newly discovered cache of drip paintings by an unknown artist? How valuable would the paintings then be? Would our assessment of Pollock or of the drip painting history in general be changed?

The Mozart year had a small coda with the apparent discovery of a juvenile piano piece (which the papers liked to identify, in typical overstatement, as a "Concerto"). What was added to our knowledge of Mozart with the piece? What was added to the piece by I.D.-ing it as Mozart's? On the other hand, what can that piece do for a scholar's career if the I.D. is accepted or rejected? And for the "first" performer or the first recording?

These things really have a lot to do with contemporary careers and reputations, sometimes a bit (in the case of the Pollock, a large bit) to do with money, and are sometimes entertaining. I've enough ethnographic training to recognize the importance of context, but in cases like these, I just want to hear a case made for the works themselves.

(Here are some links).

Memory and Allegory

Among the works of art which have been made to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001, I suspect that none will be the subject of more serious discussion than the large painting by Graydon Parrish, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001, in the New Britain (Connecticut) Museum of Art. (For images with more detail, scroll down this page).

Parrish is an artist with prodigious classical technique -- French Academic technique to be precise -- and however classical his realist figures and landscapes may be, his subjects are contemporary (the work which established Parrish's reputation, Remorse, Despondence, and Acceptance of an Early Death concerned AIDS).

Parrish's treatment of his subject is allegorical: the images stand for concrete ideas, and the composed ensemble carries both literal and allegorical messages. Parrish's classical technique is exactly what is required to pull off an allegory. However, I am far from certain that the moment for an allegorical treatment of such recent history, one in which the real images are still vivid while the message remains unclear, has yet come. Because of this, Parrish's moves -- again, classical, with the male twins in the middle, for example -- come off as staged and forced.

That said, the work is one of an enormously brave artist, and I can hardly imagine making a public musical work to compare. Composers have an advantage over realist visual artists when it comes to memorials -- it's in the nature of our medium that we needn't make any committment to sounds as literal images or to compositions of those sounds as allegories* -- and choosing particular sounds exposes a composer in a very different way from that in which a viewer associates particular images intimately with the artist. Successful musical commemorizations of historical events are rare (Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw and String Trio, certainly; Adam's On the Transmigration of Souls, perhaps), with the temptation to go "over the top" ever-present (Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, for example).

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* Some argue for a parallel status for visual realism and tonal music, an argument that just doesn't fly with me, Wilbur. See my last post on surface.

Irwin articulates

Few artists are as articulate about their work as Robert Irwin, and his enthusiasm is infectious -- he's not making any compromises, he doesn't know what's going to happen next, and he's clearly having a blast. That's exactly the career I'd like to have! Here's an excellent video (streaming, RAM).